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As a formerly dumbed down Democrat, I start this blog to counter the division created by the left / right paradigm. There are the the Elite and then there are the rest of us. This left / right paradigm is used to divide and conquer. This technique is as old as time.
The Pentagon has approached Congress to grant the Secretary of Defense the authority to post almost 400,000 military personnel throughout the United States in times of emergency or a major disaster.
This request has already occasioned a dispute with the nation’s governors. And it raises the prospect of U.S. military personnel patrolling the streets of the United States, in conflict with the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.
In June, the U.S. Northern Command distributed a “Congressional Fact Sheet” entitled “Legislative Proposal for Activation of Federal Reserve Forces for Disasters.” That proposal would amend current law, thereby “authorizing the Secretary of Defense to order any unit or member of the Army Reserve, Air Force Reserve, Navy Reserve, and the Marine Corps Reserve, to active duty for a major disaster or emergency.”
Taken together, these reserve units would amount to “more than 379,000 military personnel in thousands of communities across the United States,” explained
Paul Stockton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and America’s Security Affairs, in a letter to the National Governors Association, dated July 20.
The governors were not happy about this proposal, since they want to maintain control of their own National Guard forces, as well as military personnel acting in a domestic capacity in their states.
“We are concerned that the legislative proposal you discuss in your letter would invite confusion on critical command and control issues,” Governor James H. Douglas of Vermont and Governor Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, the president and vice president of the governors’ association, wrote in a letter back to Stockton on August 7. The governors asserted that they “must have tactical control over all . . . active duty and reserve military forces engaged in domestic operations within the governor’s state or territory.”
According to Pentagon public affairs officer Lt. Col. Almarah K. Belk, Stockton has not responded formally to the governors but understands their concerns.
“There is a rub there,” she said. “If the Secretary calls up the reserve personnel to provide support in a state and retains command and control of those forces, the governors are concerned about if I have command and control of the Guard, how do we ensure unity of effort and everyone is communicating and not running over each other.”
Belk said Stockton is addressing this problem. “That is exactly what Dr. Stockton is working out right now with the governors and DHS and the National Guard,” she said. “He’s bringing all the stakeholders together.”
Belk said the legislative change is necessary in the aftermath of a “catastrophic natural disaster, not beyond that,” and she referred to Katrina, among other events.
But NorthCom’s Congressional fact sheet refers not just to a “major disaster” but also to “emergencies.” And it says, “Those terms are defined in section 5122 of title 42, U.S. Code.”
That section gives the President the sole discretion to designate an event as an “emergency” or a “major disaster.” Both are “in the determination of the President” alone.
That section also defines “major disaster” by citing plenty of specifics: “hurricane, tornado, storm, high water, wind-driven water, tidal wave, tsunami, earthquake, volcanic eruption, landslide, mudslide, snowstorm, or drought,” as well as “fire, flood, or explosion.”
But the definition of “emergency” is vague: “Emergency means any occasion or instance for which, in the determination of the President, Federal assistance is needed to supplement State and local efforts and capabilities to save lives and to protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in any part of the United States.”
Currently, the President can call up the Reserves only in an emergency involving “a use or threatened use of a weapon of mass destruction” or “a terrorist attack or threatened terrorist attack in the United States that results, or could result, in significant loss of life or property,” according to Title 10, Chapter 1209, Section 12304, of the U.S. Code. In fact, Section 12304 explicitly prohibits the President from calling up the Reserves for any other “natural or manmade disaster, accident, or catastrophe.”
So the new proposed legislation would greatly expand the President’s power to call up the Reserves in a disaster or an emergency and would extend that power to the Secretary of Defense. (There are other circumstances, such as repelling invasions or rebellions or enforcing federal authority, where the President already has the authority to call up the Reserves.)
The ACLU is alarmed by the proposed legislation. Mike German, the ACLU’s national security policy counsel, expressed amazement “that the military would propose such a broad set of authorities and potentially undermine a 100-year-old prohibition against the military in domestic law enforcement with no public debate and seemingly little understanding of the threat to democracy.”
At the moment, says Pentagon spokesperson Belk, the legislation does not have a sponsor in the House or the Senate.
For more information on NorthCom, see Matthew Rothschild’s “What Is NorthCom Up To?” which ran on the cover of The Progressive’s February issue.
And to stay abreast of the military’s encroachment into domestic affairs and other civil liberties issues, please subscribe to The Progressive today for only $14.97 by clicking hereA team of computer scientists at University of California, San Diego, the University of Michigan and Princeton University announced a new way to electronically steal votes Monday.
“We wanted to find if a real criminal could do this, starting from scratch, with no access to source code or other closely guarded technical information,” the announcer begins. “We faced several challenges: getting a voting machine, figuring out how it works, discovering a weakness, overcoming the machine’s security features and constructing attack software.”
“In the end we found that it is possible to undetectably change votes and that such an attack takes a lot less time and money than one might expect,” the announcer said.
A Princeton professor was able to acquire five voting machines for just $82 that had been resold on a government surplus website. The acquired machines were originally sold by Sequoia Voting Systems.
While the voting machines were older and had been discontinued by North Carolina, where they were originally used, the voting apparatus are still in use in Louisiana and New Jersey.
Professors and computer science graduate students found that they could switch votes use a technique called “return oriented programming.”
The students theorized that voting machines could be easily broken into by attackers the night before the election, and vote hacking software installed. The following day, machines would produce altered votes without being able to be detected.
The study was done using 16 graduate students and cost a total of $100,000 — a tiny fraction of the money spent by both parties during the 2008 presidential campaign.
This video is from University of California, San Diego, broadcast Aug. 10, 2009.
A man carried a handgun strapped to his leg to a town hall meeting being held by President Obama in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Tuesday.
It's legal for him to have the gun as long as it is unconcealed, the police told MSNBC. The man was on private property -- church ground on the roadway leading to the high school where Obama would speak. The church gave the man permission to be there. However, according to police officers, he is under constant surveillance and is not anywhere near where the president will speak.
Talking Points Memo points out that the man was carrying a sign referencing this Jefferson quote: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
By Patrick A. Heller, Market Update
August 10, 2009
On March 17, 2008, the day that Bear Stearns failed, international journalist Max Keiser interviewed officials at the Bundesbank, the German central bank. Keiser's report, released just a few days ago, contains a stunning admission. Toward the end of his report
Keiser stated, "The most fascinating thing I've learned is that all the gold in Germany is in New York."
In the past, the Bundesbank has denied that German gold reserves were in the custody of the United States. To now reveal the truth may well cause a great controversy in German political circles.
A few years ago, Bundesbank officials admitted that it had engaged in gold swaps on behalf of another central bank, but did not identify the other party. At the time, several analysts figured that meant the Bundesbank had cooperated with the U.S. government in gold price suppression activities.
The Germans could have liquidated physical gold stored in Germany on behalf of the U.S. government and replaced it by taking title to gold stored in U.S. government vaults. It was around this time that the U.S. government completely changed its report on U.S. gold holdings from referring to them as "reserves" to calling them "Custodial gold and silver reserves."
As I write this, it isn't possible to predict the extent of the fallout of this revelation. At a minimum, I would expect a public outcry in Germany calling for gold reserves to be shipped back home.
Such a request could put the U.S. government on the spot, as there is some concern that the German gold reserves are no longer intact. Some or all of it may have been distributed to the public as part of gold price suppression schemes. If so, any request by the German government to return gold could cause a severe supply squeeze. To prevent a surge in gold demand sparked by this revelation, there could be significant price suppression efforts early this week.
WHAT ARE THESE TYRANTS PREPARING FOR US?
WHAT DO THEY KNOW ?
Here are some SWEET, SWEET excerpts from:
International Swine Flu Conference
August 19-20, 2009 Workshop: August 21, 2009 Washington, DC
Mass Fatality Management Planning
*Direct fatality management tactical operations
*Activate fatality management operations
*Conduct morgue operations
*Manage ante-mortem data
*Conduct final disposition
Psychological Issues
*Unwillingness to follow government orders
First Responders: Fire Department
*Effectively undertake mass vaccinations
*Enforce quarantines
Law Enforcement Agencies
*Protect the delivery of vaccines & essential goods & services
*Control & diffuse social unrest & public disorder
*Isolate prisons & other facilities
Airlines, Travel, Airport, Quarantine and Border
*Apprehension, examination and release